A Jersey Memory

by Crazy Ivan


Spent most of the day in New Jersey yesterday and while we were inching through traffic I found myself reflecting on a few of my Myachi memories in the Garden State.  I guess it had never occurred to me before then, but it seems like whenever I go to Jersey, it turns out to be a spectacular time.  This is actually only my fourth trip there, and every one before it marked a huge moment in Myachi.

The first time I was in Jersey I was there for a Bar Mitzvah.  I've done dozens of Bar Mitzvahs with Myachi, but this was my first.  I'd never been to one before and I really wasn't sure what to expect.  To be honest, I was a little nervous at first.  That lasted all the way to the venue and another 5 minutes after that.

Needless to say, Myachi was the star of the party.  I got about 4 dozen kids into the game (and a fair number of grown ups), I got the whole band and all the dancers playing and I earned a pretty substantial tip on my way out.  I should have known then that Jersey was just good to me, but I didn't.

The second time I went to Jersey it was a much bigger deal.  At the time we had a fulfillment center out there.  Before we opened HQ there was a period where we were paying another company to warehouse all of our Myachis and mail them out when we got orders.  This was a little while after Myachi Man realized we'd gotten too big to ship out of his basement but before we realized that we needed to go ahead and invest in a warehouse of our own.

So early one morning a few weeks before Christmas, the CBS Early Show invited Kid, Myachi Man and I to be on their show and teach the weather man how to play Myachi.  We negotiated with them and eventually they agreed to let us bring a dozen Myachi Maniacs with us that morning so, needless to say, we absolutely rocked it out.  We were seen by over a hundred thousand viewers, Myachi showed up as one of the most Googled words of the day and our phones just started ringing off the hook.



Luckily we had this fulfillment center out in Jersey so even though we were pulling in about 100 orders an hour after that we knew we had the infrastructure to handle it.  Or so we thought.  We got a call from the manager of our warehouse about an hour after the show went live telling us they were swamped with orders and there was no way they'd be able to get them all out on time.

So we loaded up and headed to Jersey.  The three of us spent the day packing orders, separating out blister packs and slapping shipping labels.  Sure, it wasn't the most fun day I've had with Myachi, but there's something pretty exciting about noticing that you've got at least three orders from every state in the union.  Woke up at the crack of dawn for the show and wound up in Jersey until well after 8 pm, but it was a great day for the movement.

But it still wasn't my favorite Jersey memory.  That would have to be signing autographs along side Shaquille O'Neal and Bernard Hopkins.

It was an event we got invited to at the last second.  Monk and I were heading out to a country club in South Jersey and we were pretty fired up about it.  We didn't know exactly what we were doing but we did know that they were sending a car for us and that was pretty sweet.  To make things even more exciting, we'd just gotten the first advanced shipments from the 3.2 series so we would be debuting a brand new series there.

Hard to believe this series was ever new...

When we got there, we were kind of flabbergasted by the whole thing.  It was a big charity event where they had a number of popular celebrities signing autographs for extraordinarily wealthy donors.  We figured it would be a great crowd to sell Myachis to, but we didn't expect them to set us up in a booth right on autograph alley.

We sold a ton of Myachis, sure, but the coolest memories of the day had to be signing my autograph right next to Shaq's.  To be honest, 90% of the people whose books (or basketballs) I signed had no clue who Monk and I were.  They were just going down a line getting autographs.  Some of them probably didn't know who David Tyree was either (though nobody that close to NYC the summer after they won the Superbowl had any excuse for that).  They were just collecting autographs from all the people they saw.

For those who don't know, David Tyree is the guy you see here
winning the Super Bowl and ruining the Pat's perfect season.

But that wasn't true in every case.  There were quite a few Maniacs from the city there and before long we had a huge congregation by our booth.  So big, in fact, that Shaq sent somebody from his entourage down to see what was going on at the booth that had a bigger crowd than his.

Yeah, a lot of people in NYC like to take pot-shots at New Jersey.  They call it Manhattan's parking lot and act like everyone in Jersey has a mullet and a Pontiac Firebird, but I suppose every state I've ever lived in has issues with the state next door.  For my money, Jersey is paved with streets of gold.  I've never had anything but the best of luck there.